This Ping-Pong Playing Robot Was Programmed by Stanford Students

A team of students over at Stanford University managed to program a few robots to perform some incredible tasks, including playing catch and even ping-pong. Coding a robot to play ping-pong is definitely not an easy task, but it looks like students in the university’s Artificial Intelligence Laboratory were quite ready for the challenge. During the first half of their class, they had to work on different assignments in order to test what they have learned in courses, but the fun really started when they got to pick from a number of robots, selected an assignment and coded the robot to perform it.

Professor of computer science, Oussama Khatib, observed that students had to use tactile perception, force sensing, position sensing and computer vision in order to complete the demonstrations with success. Aside from the ping-pong playing robot, the students also equipped a one with a mini helipad and programmed it to follow the movement of a small helicopter in order to facilitate a safe landing. Even though these tasks might seem quite ordinary for us humans, they can actually serve as bases for much more complicated exercises for robots.